Poll: Race relations were better under Bush

posted at 12:41 pm on August 26, 2014 by Noah Rothman

The public perception that race relations have not improved during the course of Barack Obama’s presidency appears to be on the rise. Some data indicate, in fact, that the Obama-era has seen racial tensions worsen.

According to one survey, not only have race relations in America worsened since 2009 when they improved greatly in the immediate wake of the election of the nation’s first African-American president, an eventuality which was to be expected, they are generally worse than in 2007 when George W. Bush (a man who we were told by figures of influence “doesn’t care about black people”) occupied the Oval Office.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted that a recent Pew Research Center poll indicates that faith among African-Americans in law enforcement to act fairly has plummeted. In 2007, only 31 percent of black respondents had “very little” faith in local police. Today, 46 percent said the same.

The survey also shows that 64 percent of African-Americans believe blacks and whites “get along very well” or “pretty well” today. In 2007, that figure was 69 percent rising to 76 percent in 2009. Pew’s latest results represent a 12 point shift backwards.

Much of these findings may be perception resulting from what feels like an intensive focus on race relations in the media. A New York Times-CBS News poll released last week showed that 9 in 10 Americans believe race relations have not improved under Obama. 52 percent believe they have roughly stayed the same while 35 percent said they have gotten worse.

More interestingly, 40 percent of white respondents believe race relations have regressed under Obama while only 21 percent of African-American respondents said the same.

Adding to the suspicion that the press is partially responsible for the perception that race relations are on the decline, 78 percent of respondents in the Times-CBS poll said race relations in their own communities were generally good while just 47 percent said the same of the nation as a whole.

Blake notes, however, that the depressing Pew poll might be a bit misleading. A Gallup survey taken in 2013 showed that the number of African-Americans saying they had a negative view of race relations between blacks and whites plateaued in 2007 at 43 percent and has plummeted to just 33 percent today. Moreover, the total number of those who express a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of concern in race relations has generally trended in a positive direction since 2001.

In the new Pew poll in particular, the sample size for African Americans is small — only about 150 people — so it’s tough to draw too many hard and fast conclusions. But the 12-point shifts on blacks’ feelings about their relationships with police and whites are outside the margin of error.

That doesn’t mean they are necessarily huge shifts — we’ll have to await more data — but this poll suggests Ferguson might be hurting the climate of race relations in the United States.

That is not shocking, considering how this story has dominated the news media. It is just as possible that posterity could view the unrest in Ferguson as just one of many stories of racial tension which do not inhibit racial progress.

Comity between the races in the United States moves in fits and starts, and progress is occasionally impeded by national events that exacerbate racial tensions. In 1995, in the wake of the trial of O.J. Simpson, racial progress appeared to be heading in reverse. Just 32 percent of Americans said civil rights for blacks had “greatly improved” while 51 percent said they had only improved “somewhat.” By 2011, however, 50 percent of Americans agreed African-American civil rights had “greatly improved” while another 39 percent appended the qualifier “somewhat” to that level of improvement.

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, which arrested economic progress, the wealth and income gaps between blacks and whites were closing every year. The 2010 census revealed that African-Americans were more likely than any other group to receive some college education, though they were not the demographic most likely to graduate from an institution of higher learning.

Racial progress does not move in a constant direction in this country, and that improvement is often stunted by events. But the historical trajectory is, in general, consistently positive. The Obama presidency and the media’s fixation with racial tension during it represent one of history’s obstacles in the path toward progress. If the lessons of history are to be believed, this period in American history is more of a speed bump than a blockade along the road to equality.

The fact that you compare IRS scrutiny towards tea party groups with police murdering one citizen, and then assaulting an entire city with impunity when they resist says everything we need to know. Classic white supremacism. The murder of a black man is equivalent to a sternly worded letter to a white man. Thanks for proving my point.

But in the end it’s all about Government Authority being crushed onto an individual, isn’t it?…

You want more government, cops acting with impunity is more government, welcome to Utopia.

Bishop on August 14, 2014 at 9:52 AM

That pretty much covers it, professor. You don’t get to pick and choose which overbearing and all-encompassing anti-citizen mother hen government mentality you support. You indicate you want it, and then you relax and try to enjoy it as they give it to you.

You told them you wanted it, professor, and now comes your obligation for the next bit.

That’s because the dimwitcrats need racial strife in order to win, so they stoke the hatred.

Flange on August 26, 2014 at 12:47 PM

That’s because our Dear Leader wasn’t a community organizer, he was a community agitator. His goal was to gin up an angry mob and extract anything he could from those that had it. That’s still his approach to Domestic politics.

The leader sets the tone. Obama has always been obsessed with race, since he was a child. What it means to be black, how blacks are treated by whites, social justice as a community organizer, Rev. Wright’s racist church of black liberation theology, the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and now Michael Brown. He’s a race-baiter. His go to guy on race is now Al Sharpton, for heaven’s sake.

GW Bush was colorblind. He truly was. No less a symbol of universal compassion and love as the Dalai Lama said that while he didn’t agree with W on politics, he thought he was a great guy. Two peas in the compassion pod.

I guess for the whole 8 years Bush was in office, no white person (cop or citizen) ever shot and killed a black person. I come to that conclusion because we certainly never had a Trayvon or Ferguson incident with rioting, looting, and incessant news media coverage during that time. I guess we had a blissful 8 years during that time.

And the income wage gap between black and white was it’s narrowest under Reagan.

libfreeordie’s job is to make sure that minorities can be fed continual stream of excuses by elites for why lefty policies have utterly failed them for 70 years. His job is to hide the fact that municipalities dominated by lefty political machines for decades and decades are the worst places for minorities to work and live.

They just seemed better, because African-Americans and leaders such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were afraid to speak out.

Frank Lib on August 26, 2014 at 1:11 PM

Good lord, the fantasies liberals have to tell themselves just to get by. Dubya nominated the first two African American Secretaries of State. Oh yeah, and Frank… Al Sharpton and Jesse Jacksons are NOT leaders, even if they do lead more than Obama.

I was being charitable. There’s redemption for everyone, and she’s not all bad.

LashRambo on August 26, 2014 at 1:30 PM

I’d tend to be less charitable. She’s an angry black woman. A racist. Tone deaf to the cost (to the taxpayers) for the lavish vacations and parties. She lectures about good nutrition to the point of being strident. She’s embraced the urban myth of food deserts. She isn’t even raising her own children without staff.

Best I can do is call her a one percenter to acknowledge that part of her soul that isn’t pure evil.

The fact that you compare IRS scrutiny towards tea party groups with police murdering one citizen, and then assaulting an entire city with impunity when they resist says everything we need to know. Classic white supremacism. The murder of a black man is equivalent to a sternly worded letter to a white man. Thanks for proving my point.

libfreeordie on August 14, 2014 at 9:40 AM

The fact that you call it murder is shocking.

There is plenty of evidence at this point that it was Brown trying to murder Wilson. The evidence is not all in, but it is clear the witnesses did not understand what they saw. They didn’t know about the struggle over the gun or the violence on Wilson, before he could even get out of the car.

Your own racism makes you set aside all evidence with which you disagree.

And the brown shirts who raided conservatives, sometimes multiple times in swat gear because of supporting the opposite politics, is not a sternly worded letter. It is violence done to self-government that can never be undone!!!!

And the result of throwing an election and foisting, by fraud, a corrupt illegitimate government on the United States, is doing far more damage to the world than the sad death of one criminal kid in Missouri.

The policies if this President will cause more deaths than one incident in MO could ever hope to compete with.

This battle over quotas for public-sector jobs is a glaring example of how immigration is turning the race-based policies of the last 40 years, originally designed to help blacks, against them. For African-American leaders like Claud Anderson, head of the Harvest Institute, the turnabout represents a betrayal of the civil rights movement: only blacks deserve quotas. “When did our government ever exclude immigrants or deny them their constitutional rights, as they did African-Americans?” he asks. But for other blacks, the demands of Latinos and Asians that government set-aside programs include them are further evidence that racial preferences were misguided in the first place. “Blacks who support skin color privileges now will be singing a different tune later once government starts discriminating against them once again, this time in favor of Hispanics,” writes columnist and blogger La Shawn Barber.

Snip…

Nicolás Vaca, the writer, dismisses the notion that African-Americans and Latinos are natural allies. “A divide exists between Blacks and Latinos that no amount of camouflage can hide,” he writes in his book The Presumed Alliance. Vaca says that the split has been evident for years, though largely ignored by the media and political leaders. He contends, for instance, that the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by the LAPD’s beating of Rodney King, became on the ground a black-brown confrontation in which the majority of businesses destroyed were Latino. At the same time, Vaca argues, Latinos believe that, since they had nothing to do with black oppression in America, they owe blacks nothing and “come to the table with a clear conscience.”

At the rate the blacks are going, being driven by the Obama regime and their own race warriors, no one is going to give a crap about black people. Hispanics and Asians do not like them and do not trust them. The era of The Race Card(TM) as a tool of intimidation to get Caucasians to bend to their will and give them what they want is rapidly coming to an end, too. Of course the black race warriors and their MSM allies will continue to try to ‘party like it’s the 1960’s’ as we have seen recently in Ferguson and will be surprised and alarmed by the blow back against them. They will then try to toss The Victim Card(TM) only to find that no one is buying that one, either.